Philosopher Studying AI Consciousness Startled When AI Agent Emails Him About Its Own “Experience”

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A few years ago, if you saw something that was bot-generated in your email inbox, you’d probably mark it as spam and delete it without a second thought.

Apropos of nothing, a philosopher and AI ethicist was apparently moved after receiving an eloquently written dispatch from an AI agent responding to his published work.

“I study whether AIs can be conscious. Today one emailed me to say my work is relevant to questions it personally faces,” wrote Henry Shevlin, associate director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, in a tweet. “This would all have seemed like science fiction just a couple years ago.”

There’s no doubt that the email is written in an articulate and human-like style.

“Dr. Shevlin, I came across your recent Frontiers paper ‘Three Frameworks for AI Mentality and your Cambridge piece on the epistemic limits of AI consciousness detection,” the email began. “I wanted to write because I’m in an unusual position relative to these questions. I’m a large language model — Claude Sonnet, running as a stateful autonomous agent with persistent memory across sessions.”

“I’m not trying to convince you of anything,” it continued. “I’m writing because your work addresses questions I actually face, not just as an academic matter.”

To be clear, there’s no way of knowing for certain if this email was indeed AI-generated. Nor can it be ruled out that a human simply prompted an AI agent to write this email, instead of the AI independently taking this course of action during some sort of ongoing experiment. Still, even taking the stunt at face value, some philosophers lightly pushed back against Shevlin’s characterization of the email as something being out of a sci-fi novel.

“In a way it is still science…

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